Plenary speakers

Uwe Bornscheuer has studied chemistry and got his PhD in Technical Chemistry at the University of Hannover in 1993. After a postdoctoral stay in Nagoya, Japan, he got his Habilitation at the University of Stuttgart in Technical Biochemistry in 1998. Since 1999, he is Professor at the University of Greifswald at the Institute of Biochemistry, where he leads the Department of Biotechnology & Enzyme Catalysis.

Dr. Reinhard Fischer received undergraduate and graduate training at the University of Marburg, Germany.  His PhD thesis was on methanogenic archaea, supervised by Rolf Thauer.  From 1992 to 1993 he was a post-doctoral fellow with William E. Timberlake at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.  His research at that time focused on nuclear migration and conidiophore development in Aspergillus nidulans. Dr. Fischer established his own research group in 1994 at the University of Marburg and the Max-Planck-Institute for terrestrial Microbiology and accepted an associate professor position at the University of Karlsruhe in 2004. He was promoted to a full professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2008. 

His research focuses on different aspects of basic and applied fungal biology using A. nidulans, Alternaria alternata and the nematode-trapping fungus Arthrobotrys flagrans as model systems. He has graduated 53 Ph.D. students and supervised more than 100 Bachelor- and Master theses. He served for the German Research foundation (DFG) as member of the microbiology panel for 8 years and for the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes for 12 years. He has been Vice Dean and Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry and Biosciences. Information about the Fischer lab can be found here: https://www.iab.kit.edu/microbio/

Christian C. Gruber earned his PhD in bioorganic chemistry and structural biology from the University of Graz, with research periods at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. After postdoctoral work at the Institute of Molecular Biosciences in Graz, he joined the Cluster of Excellence “Simulation Technology” at the University of Stuttgart and later the Austrian Centre for Industrial Biotechnology in Industrial Protein Design & Engineering. In 2018, he co-founded Innophore, a research company collaborating with Google and Amazon on enzyme and drug discovery, and in 2021 returned to the University of Graz, where he teaches Structural Bioinformatics and Molecular Virology. His research focuses on the dynamic behavior of biomolecules, using structural bioinformatics, data mining, AI, and the Catalophore approach to study structural, functional, dynamic, and thermodynamic properties. By leveraging high-performance computing and cloud infrastructure, his work advances applications in drug and protein research for biotechnology, biomedicine, and the pharmaceutical industry.

Diploma degree in Biology and doctorate in Microbiology

Katharina Höfer is a Fellow of the LOEWE Center for Synthetic Microbiology (SYNMIKRO) and affiliated Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany. Katharina has been awarded a LOEWE top professorship at the Philipps University of Marburg. She is an associated faculty Member of the Chemistry Faculty, University Marburg, vice-spokesperson of a DFG-funded Research Training Group 2937 and ERC Starting Grant awardee. She is a biotechnologist well known for her pioneering discovery and functional characterization of NAD-capped RNAs in bacteria and bacteriophages. 

Martin Kaltenpoth obtained his MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Würzburg in Germany, followed by postdoctoral research at the University of Regensburg and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. In 2009, he established the Insect Symbiosis Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena. From 2015 to 2021, he was full professor for Evolutionary Ecology at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Since 2021, he is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena and heads the Department of Insect Symbiosis. His research focuses on the evolution, chemical ecology, and the molecular interactions of insect-bacteria symbioses, using an integrative and multidisciplinary approach to understand symbiotic associations from the molecule to the fitness consequences for the interacting partners.

Lisa Maier is a trained biochemist and microbiologist. She earned her PhD from the Institute of Microbiology at ETH Zurich in 2014. During her postdoctoral work in Nassos Typas' lab at EMBL Heidelberg, she developed high-throughput methods to systematically investigate drug-microbiome interactions. Since 2019, she has led her independent research group at the University Hospital Tübingen, which expanded into a full professorship in 2022. In her lab, she studies how medicinal drugs from various therapeutic classes interact with gut microbes and how these interactions affect the host.

Research interests

The Papenfort lab studies the molecular principles underlying quorum sensing, virulence, and stress response in the major human pathogen, Vibrio cholerae and various related pathogens. We are particularly interested in regulatory mechanisms involving non-coding RNA and RNA-binding proteins, as well as the role of small proteins in microbial pathogens. Further we develop and characterize synthetic RNAs regulators that can be employed to address fundamental aspects in biology, as well as questions in biotechnology and phage biology.

Awards & Honours

ERC Consolidator Grant (2023), Vallee Scholar Award (2019), ERC Starting Grant (2017), Research Award of the Peter und Traudl Engelhorn Foundation (2017), HFSP Career Development Award (2016), Elected Member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Young Scholars‘ Programme; 2016-2019), Postdoc Award of the Robert-Koch-Society (2014), HFSP Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2012-2015), VAAM PhD Award (2011), PhD fellowship Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds (2007-2009)

Current editor positions and editorial boards

PLoS Genetics, Molecular Microbiology, RNA Biology, microLife, Journal of Bacteriology, Microbes & Infection

Uwe Sauer is a trained microbiologist with a PhD from the University of Göttingen in 1993. Since 2006 he is professor for systems biology at the ETH Zurich, focussing on fundamental questions related to microbial metabolism. His lab combines modeling with quantitative experimentation, in particular mass spectrometry-based methods for 13C-flux analysis and high-throughput metabolomics. His main research focus is identification and quantification of i) the key regulation mechanisms that control microbial metabolism and ii) metabolic interactions in microbial communities. 

Department of Molecular Microbiology, John Innes Centre, Norwich, NR4 7UH, United Kingdom. E-mail: susan.schlimpert@jic.ac.uk

Susan Schlimpert is a Group Leader at the John Innes Centre in the UK. She was trained as a bacterial cell biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology (Germany), where she worked on cell division and cellular differentiation in Caulobacter crescentus with Martin Thanbichler. She then joined Mark Buttner’s research group at the John Innes Centre (UK) with a Leopoldina Postdoctoral Scholarship to study Streptomyces cell division. In 2019, she received a Royal Society University Fellowship to launch her independent career at the John Innes Centre. Her lab studies bacterial multicellular development, with a particular focus on cell division and cellular differentiation in actinobacteria, including Streptomyces and Mycobacteria.

Research interests
The Vogel lab strives to understand the full spectrum of noncoding RNA and RNA-binding proteins in bacterial pathogens and in members of the human microbiome. We develop new RNA-seq based techniques to rapidly capture the RNA world of any microbe, ideally at the level of single cells, and understand how and why bacteria use RNA as a regulator as they infect humans. We ask basic mechanistic questions of RNA Biology but also work on RNA-centric manipulations of the microbiota.

Awards & Honours
Elected to Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2023), Feldberg Prize (2019), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award, DFG (2017), Honorary Professor, Imperial College London (2016), Elected to European Academy of Microbiology (2015), German National Academy of Sciences (2013), American Academy of Microbiology (2013), EMBO Member (2011), DGHM Senior Scientist Award (2011), VAAM Research Award (2010)

Current editor positions and editorial boards
Molecular Cell, EMBO Journal, RNA, Nucleic Acids Research, Molecular Microbiology, mBio, microLife

Selected current committee work
2021 - President, European Academy of Microbiology (EAM)
2018 - Scientific Advisory Board, DFG NGS Competence Centers
2016 - Genome Editing Committee, German National Academy of Sciences

Five selected publications
Stapels DAC, Hill PWS, Westermann AJ, Fisher R, Thurston TL, Saliba AE, Blommestein I, Vogel J, Helaine S (2018)
Salmonella persisters undermine host immune defences during antibiotic treatment
Science 362(6419):1156-1160
Westermann AJ, Förstner KU, Amman F, Barquist L, Chao Y, Schulte LN, Müller L, Reinhardt R, Stadler PF, Vogel J (2016)
Dual RNA-seq unveils noncoding RNA functions in host-pathogen interactions
Nature 529:496-501
Papenfort K, Sun Y, Miyakoshi M, Vanderpool CK, Vogel J (2013)
Small RNA-mediated activation of sugar phosphatase mRNA regulates glucose homeostasis
Cell 153:426–437
Deltcheva E, Chylinski K, Sharma CM, Gonzales K, Chao Y, Pirzada ZA, Eckert MR, Vogel J, Charpentier E (2011)
CRISPR RNA maturation by trans-encoded small RNA and host factor RNase III
Nature 471(7340):602-7
Sharma CM, Hoffmann S, Darfeuille F, Reignier J, Findeiß S, Sittka A, Chabas S, Reiche K, Hackermüller J, Reinhardt R, Stadler PF,
Vogel J (2010)
The primary transcriptome of the major human pathogen Helicobacter pylori
Nature 464(7285)250-255

Barrie Wilkinson is a Group Leader in Molecular Microbiology at the John Innes Centre (JIC) and the Centre for Microbial Interactions in Norwich UK where his lab uses chemical biology and genetic methods to discover new bacterial specialised metabolites and study their biosynthesis, and to probe the role these molecules play in the environment. They also develop tools and methods to aid specialised metabolite discovery and rational bioengineering, and to identify the biological targets and mechanism of action of antibacterial molecules. Since 2019 he has been the lead of JICs Institute Strategic Programmes Molecules from Nature and subsequently Harnessing Biosynthesis for Sustainable Food & Health.

Prior to joining JIC Barrie spent 16 years in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, first at GlaxoWellcome (now GSK) and then as VP for Research & Development at Biotica Technology Ltd, a UK biotechnology company exploiting polyketide specialised metabolites as leads for pharmaceutical and agrochemical R&D. In 2013 he co-founded Isomerase Therapeutics Ltd to develop specialised metabolites as therapeutics targeted at peptidyl-prolyl cis-trans isomerases. He was trained at the Universities of Leeds (BSc in chemistry & PhD with Dr Richard B. Herbert), Washington (postdoc with Prof Heinz G. Floss) and Cambridge (postdocs with Prof Jim Staunton and Prof Peter F. Leadlay).